It’s not enough to throw up an ecommerce store on a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce and wait for customers and their dollars to roll in. You need to think through how people will get from where they are on their computer to your site so they can even consider buying your products.

Here are our top suggestions for paid ad and organic SEO strategy for ecommerce stores.

Make sure each product has its own landing page

Too many small e-commerce business owners think of the visitor’s website journey starting on the home page and progressing through the products, but if you’re running Google AdWords or Facebook Ad campaigns you should have what is essentially a sales page for each product.

Visitors should be sent from the ad they click directly to the product advertised, they should see all the images and information they need to make a purchase decision from that one page. Having a landing page with text well-matched to its ad also increases your Quality Score, which can increase your ad position while decreasing your cost per click.

Revisit your keyword research regularly

It’s amazing what new phrases you’ll find to target or old phrases you’ll decide need less focus when you look at your list of target keywords with fresh eyes. This goes for both paid search and SEO. Don’t make keyword research a one-time event.

Long-tail keywords, in particular, require regular keyword research. Check out forums mentioned in the post linked above to gather a list of questions people are asking that you can answer, or check out our very favorite resource for content creation ideas: http://answerthepublic.com/.

Sharpen your content strategy

It’s not enough to toss up an e-commerce store and wait for customers to show up. To rank organically, you need to give a little before you receive.

What free resource can you provide others that will bring them to your site before they search for your products?

With our client that sells high end wooden spice racks, we’re making the spice profile posts more robust so that they’re some of the best resources online about those spices. (See our example posts about Black Seed and Star Anise.) This gives people a reason to find the site when they’re searching for information about spices and for some of them to link to it, thus boosting our SEO. Since we’ve made these posts more robust, they’ve become some of the top organic landing pages for the whole site. Even though most visitors who arrive to read about particular spices will never buy one of their products, Google Analytics sees how long people people are are staying on the site and Google may well spread some benefit to the rest of the domain.

Oh, and don’t skimp on post length. Longer is better for SEO in 2017!

Engage in regular link outreach

Links are the most important SEO ranking factor, so if you want to rank organically, you need a plan you regularly execute to build up inbound links to your website. Luckily, if you’re creating valuable content like blog posts that people can benefit from for free, then you have assets to approach other webmasters about linking to. If you just have a store, other people have little reason to link to you unless you’re selling something novel like custom pet oil portraits. But if you have valuable content, other people might have a reason to open your outreach email and maybe even their content management system (CMS, like WordPress) and make a link to your site.

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